Lovers and Other Strangers
by TheLongStreet
Summary: Love in the time of Central Air.


Title: Lovers and Other Strangers

Author: TheLongStreet

Pairing: House/Wilson

Disclaimer: House, MD. does not belong to me, sadly. No copyright infringement is intended.

Monday mornings are not Cuddy's best. Actually, she doesn't think they're anyone's best, but they're particularly not hers. She knows a few people who look forward to the start of their workweek, but they're either sleeping with their bosses or due for appointments in the psych ward, and as Cuddy is not insane and has no interest in following Narcissist's folly, she has long since prepared herself for the slow, bitter traffic jam that marks the beginning of another round. As a highly sensitive, intelligent, not to mention sexy human being (and no, she thinks, it's not entirely uncool to quote your own e-harmony bio), she is more than capable of handling each morning with the grace her position requires.

"Fuck!" she slams one hand angrily on the horn of her steering wheel and throws an acid look into her rear view mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of the asshole who's just nearly touched her back bumper (and no, she doesn't mean it like that, and besides, she'd probably be cheering in any case, because no one's checked out her bio in a long, loooong time). A head of thick brown hair jerks up with a start at the sound of her horn, brown eyes touching on hers with a strange intimacy as she lifts her fingers to her face in shock, eyes still glued to the mirror. Suddenly, Cuddy finds herself hoping that she hasn't been shouting as loudly as she thinks.

"Hello, Dr. Wilson," she mouths into the mirror, and proceeds wearily on to work, trying not to feel too embarrassed. After all, everyone knows that Mondays aren't her best.

After a lucky break at an intersection, Cuddy tears into the hospital parking lot at breakneck speed and practically races to the doors, breaths coming harshly in her throat as she nervously jabs the glowing elevator buttons, fidgeting compulsively with the collar of her tight fitting blouse as she ponders quickly what to do. Should she apologize to Wilson? He hadn't actually given any indication that he'd recognized her, after all. Sure, there'd been a few terrifying seconds when she'd been sure she'd seen understanding in those gooey, chocolate brown eyes, but only a moment later he'd glanced away tiredly, as if he'd seen nothing at all. When she'd looked back a minute later, his handsome face had seemed suspiciously absent, little indication of the kindly doctor's pleasant habits showing itself in the unforgiving light as he squinted determinedly at the road ahead of them, untouched by her prying eyes

Everyone knew that a doctor was hardly human before he'd had his initial gallon of coffee. Of course he hadn't recognized her, she rationalizes. She'd be a fool to bring it up, to confuse an employee like that so early in the morning. No, she'll handle this like an adult. Frankly, she's more than willing to pretend that it had never happened. In fact, she'd like nothing better than to ignore the hungry look she'd caught fading in her colleague's eyes.

××××××××××

By noon, it is becoming more and more apparent that something is afoot in her hospital. For one thing, her office smells like ass, and hers isn't the only one. Every minute the ventilation systems pump out another cubic foot of loathsome, gaseous stink, and she is powerless to stop it. As a result, all offices that share the floor with the diagnostics wing (not, she thinks, a coincidence) are currently marinating in the strange, distinctly vengeful scent of singeing paper. It sucks.

Additionally, several reports on Wilson, retrieved by her eager, ass-kissing undergraduate spies, have pegged him as in 'a zombie-like state', or 'looking ghoulish' or harshest yet, 'soulless'. Um, what? Dr. James do-you-need-me Wilson, wandering around like an unchecked fledgling of the legions of the undead? Unheard of. Word is he hasn't flirted with a single nurse _all morning. _ Cuddy wonders if maybe the stench in his office is getting to his head.

Most worrying, however, is the fact that she hasn't had an unpleasant run in with House yet. In fact, she hasn't even seen him. And his underlings, usually busy as beavers by this hour of the morning, can be seen slinking to and from the bathrooms closest to their office, doing their best not to be noticed. The reason for this, she discerns at 12:15, when she abandons any notions of a restful lunch to pester House about Wilson, is to conceal the fact that their boss isn't even _there. _As in, he hasn't bothered to come in to work yet. Probably isn't bothering to come in at all. No one knows anything. He isn't answering his phone, his pager, or even her angry, telepathic attempts to fry his brain from her desk.

And no one knows what's wrong with Wilson. Cuddy catches sight of him in the pediatric lounge, staring blankly at the white walls as if there was not a shred of intelligence in him. His eyes, usually brimming with an immeasurable luster of insight and sympathy, are turned passively inward, giving him an empty, lifeless quality that she must admit does liken him to the brainless, soulless pawns of many a nineties horror flick. He does not know where House is. There are bags under his eyes that could hide a body, but Cuddy doesn't think he's in there.

The hurt on his face when she says Gregory's name reminds her that she is approaching forty, that she is husbandless, childless, and alone. It has never occurred to her before that he is all of these things also, and more. He is a talented lover (hearsay) and good friend (firsthand), a skillful doctor (numbers don't lie) and an unmatched human being with an unlimited capacity to feel compassion. She hates him for still being so small.

Cuddy calls Stacy at 1:00, struggling not to gag into the receiver as the godawful stench, coupled with the growing terror in the pit of her stomach, gallantly attempts to launch her breakfast all over the afternoon's paperwork. Fighting panic, she squeezes her eyes shut and prays that her longtime friend will answer the phone. After seven heartbreaking rings, she does.

"Stacy?"

"Lisa, is that you? What's wrong, you sound terrible!" Cuddy smiles wryly at the statement, but it's barely a reflex. The feeling is not there.

"Uh," she attempts gracefully, suddenly unsure of how to address the situation.

"Has something happened? Is Greg hurt? Are you hurt?"

"N-no, nothing like that," Cuddy stutters quickly, realizing that too much of her uncertainty is coming out in her voice. She doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to explain the desolation on Wilson's face, or House's inexplicable disappearance. Suddenly, she doesn't know why she's called at all. Stacy used to be the one sure way to understand what House was thinking, on the off chance that Wilson was out of town, or otherwise unavailable to translate. But it has been many years, she realizes with a start, since Stacy has been a part of their daily lives, and they are just not the same any more. They are none of them the same.

"What makes the air in a vent system smell?"

"… Like what?"

"Paper," she announces, taking a huge sniff of air and then wrinkling her nose in disgust.

"Burning paper. Awful and sad."

"There's probably something in a vent," Stacy says slowly, curiosity evident in her voice. Since smelly paper smell is obviously not the only reason for her friend's manifest distress. "Have you asked around? Someone might have something in front of a vent, or even inside one, by accident, that is causing everything else to carry that odor. Is that all?" The pause is expectant. Cuddy twirls her hair, thinks about Wilson's lost look, so many hours before, trapped in gridlock on an endless freeway.

"Have you ever known some thing to affect Greg or James that did not affect the other?"

She does not know why she says this, except that she's noticed Wilson seems much happier when he is riding in House's corvette, although she suspects this may run concurrently with the knowledge that his best friend is not out terrorizing the streets in the deathcycle.

"No," Stacy admits quietly. "They're a right strange pair, aren't they? The only thing," she sighs, perhaps too sadly, "the only thing that has survived all these years. I wonder how they do it?"

If Cuddy is being honest with herself, she will remember there isn't a person on the planet who has loved her that long.

××××××

At six o clock she sends home everyone that she can afford to be without. By now, it's not just the diagnostics floor that starting to stink but the floors directly above and below as well. She's already sent House's team to the clinic hours ago, telling them that if they didn't have anything to do they could start working off House's clinic hours, since he was as much their responsibility as hers. Normally, she'd be concerned with their inability to reach the curmudgeonous doctor, but Wilson's low spirits indicate that something is afoot. House is not dead at the bottom of set of stairs somewhere in the bowels of a Princeton NJ whorehouse. Probably. Perhaps Wilson is upset because he pushed him?

Frowning, Cuddy edges her way into Wilson's office, anticipation fluttering inside her chest in an all together unpleasant fashion.

"Wilson?" She calls to him softly, as if he were a frightened child at the corner of busy street, prepared to bolt at any moment into the murderous traffic flow she senses can only be just around the bend.

"James? I'm sending everyone on these floors home now, alright?" It smells particularly awful in his office. A rush of sympathy and (dare she say matronly) concern leads her to place a hand on his shoulder and speak quietly into his ear, trying hard not to remember the exhaustion on his face, and in his voice.

"You really don't know where G- House is?" He shakes his head, as she's expecting. "Did you two have a fight?"

"There never was a 'you two'," he murmurs sullenly, his voice dull. "That was a lie." He stands abruptly, the legs of his chair screaming angrily as he pushes away from his desk. Cuddy watches with a disengaged horror as her hand falls limply to her side, fingers curling instinctively in towards her palms, pink half moons lightly kissing the soft flesh.

"Whose lie?" She asks quietly, her heart racing. "Wilson, whose lie?" The blood has left his face; he is immobile as wax, as white as ghost. He sways before her as if he were only an illusion, the impression of a cigarette a waft of smoke may leave behind.

"Mine."

It is amazing, Cuddy observes, how substantial a specter may seem when once again you are looking at nothing.

Also, it is unbelievable how bad it smells in Wilson's office.

Spurred on by the memory of a calm voice, Cuddy approaches Wilson's vent in what she hopes is a casual manner, praying that Wilson is already well on his way to the elevator, and not planning on coming back for anything (like a bite of my brain, she thinks, zeroing in on his zoned out face). His words bounce around in her head as she digs through his desk for a pen big enough to turn the screws with. Mine. My lie, my lie. _My Lai. _A massacre, she thinks, unsettled despite herself.

The vent is about midway between the floor and the ceiling. She has to sit on Wilson's desk to reach it, and she has a little trouble, for the first time, she thinks derisively, in her entire career, with her chosen ensemble. The tiny white screws offer little resistance. She removes the third and the whole rectangular front-piece spins towards the floor, hanging vertically from the fourth and final screw, the one and only thing keeping it from crashing headlong into the carpet. She refuses to see the irony in this.

Tangled up in the thin white bars is a single piece of charred paper, its corner brown but otherwise unharmed. She extricates it cautiously, employing the delicate precision with which Cuddy has always handled her problems, even when they are not people. It is warm to the touch, but she feels cold, an icy shiver of dread shaking through her. In her heart, she cannot believe that Wilson has done anything so terrible, but why else would he hide paper in the vent?

Because if he threw it in the garbage can, House would find it. Nothing is private. She feels a stab of guilt, but it's nothing fatal.

Wilson, the note announces.

Sorry, but I love you. Please don't marry any more women.

House

For the second time that day Cuddy finds herself racing for the elevator, her breath crying in her throat. Because she was spying on Wilson when he came in (as a concerned friend, of course) she knows where he's parked. He's still there, keys in hand, staring at the metal tools as if he has no idea what to do with them. There is a wrinkle between his eyebrows that she has never noticed before.

She crushes the note in her fist, surprised to realize that she is crying.

"What have you done?" She shouts at him. His eyes register no change. She cannot deepen his despair. It is beyond them.

"Where is he?" She whispers gently, but he turns away and as if he has just remembered how, he turns the keys in the lock, closing his heart to her.

"You know."

Cuddy sits weakly on the curb, smearing her makeup with trembling fists. The rumble of Wilson's engine tapers off in the distance, disappearing as if it never was. Slowly, the scent of burning fills her chest, and she's crying again, and somehow she remembers that eventually all will be dark.

×××××××

In the end, she can't bring herself to go back into the hospital. She emails her secretary from her PDA and slouches out to her car, aching in all manners she cannot describe. Her ass hurts from sitting on the curb, her head hurts from the incredible, damnable frustration of it all, and her heart hurts, most unbearably, because she cannot understand how she never saw this coming.

House, she tries it out slowly. And Wilson. House and Wilson. houseandwilson. She never could have imagined a hell that deep. It explains everything, and equally nothing, but nothing explains the terrified look on Wilson's face. It is unthinkable that he could not love him.

Such a tragic waste, she thinks slyly, of two perfectly good sperm donors.

××××××

"Lisa!" Stacy's voice rings in Cuddy's ear, the tinned quality generally associated with cell phones doing nothing to reduce the tension in her voice.

"I think it's time you tell me what's going on." Slowly, Cuddy returns her fork to her steaming pile of mashed potatoes. It seems like this situation isn't something comfort food is going to fix. Sighing heavily, she lifts the phone to her ear once more, wishing, and not for the first time, that she possessed Greg's superhuman intuition, or at the very least, James' social skills. Which she's only once questioned in fifteen years. There's a first time for everything.

"What do you want to know?" Secretly, she is a little possessive of her boys, especially House. She doesn't know what Wilson has done, exactly, but she senses instinctively that now isn't the time to bring Stacy into the equation, if she can help it. Stacy and Wilson are, after all, the only two people that House has ever loved.

"Why don't we start with what Wilson is doing sobbing in my living room. Where's House? Shouldn't he be taking care of this?" Cuddy can hear it, in her voice, the anger and confusion that mirrors her own. Shit. Beneath the pettiness, the bets, the games, the fights, there has always been one truth concerning House: he is the wind in all of their sails.

"Can you put Wilson on the phone please?"

"Okay, but I don't know if he's really up to talking just yet." The doubt in Stacy's voice is evident. "Really, he hasn't stopped crying since he got here. He hasn't recently divorced, has he? I mean, I was pretty sure… but-"

"No, there's no woman this time. Can I just speak to him please? I'll be nice." The smile in her voice is a testament to their friendship, however worn it has become, stretching and scratching over the myriad surfaces of their lives. She trusts Stacy to understand. There is a moment of silence and then heavy breathing fuzzes over on the other line. Against her cheek, the phone slowly warms to the touch. Romantically, and only for an instant, she allows herself to imagine how it might have been. With men such as them:

As tenderly and hesitantly as is possible. She can feel it against her face, warming the inside of her palm, like the nervous, stuttering progression from the lukewarm intricacies to – to a love on fire. Masked in the glow of the cell phone's face, her cheeks flame.

"Am I wrong about you?"

"No."

"Is _he _wrong about you?" There is an honest pause, barely the width of a shuddering exhale, where Cuddy can feel the silence lessening, growing brighter.

"Is he ever wrong?"

××××××

Cuddy prefers to remember the next bits in images only. It's better not to recall the dialogue, other than the steady, incessant pounding of her heartbeat as she slips the mat-key into House's lock. She knows it's best to ignore the bitter words and angry shouts, the savage accusations, the sharp pain in her chest when the you's become I's and his face collapses like an empty windsock without a twist of the world behind it.

A quiet cigar smokes hazily from the piano as evening light slurs drunkenly across the keys, an untouched glass of amber liquid glows lazily, lit from the inside, as if beholden with a spark, that which has left him. Poetry keeps the emptiness from devouring the moment. When she takes him by the hand and leads him to the door, he follows, utterly acquiescent, the soft mark of his cane an impassive timepiece in the echoing hall.

It has been raining, sometime, while they were gone. It feels to Cuddy as if time has temporarily frozen, paused with one footstep on the stair, on the threshold of a wonderful or terrible discovery. It seems strange that the weather can act independently of this standstill, as if it has somehow escaped the broken circle, running madly down the gutters in a terrific rush of sound that somehow makes their silence more bearable.

At a stoplight, Cuddy studies House's image in a trembling puddle. It is just barely visible, a watery reflection of what appears to her to be a watery reflection of what was once a man. Fleetingly, Cuddy imagines her steaming mashed potatoes and savory rosemary chicken. Less easily she recalls House's face after the first operation, Wilson's discreetly rumpled suits, the way Stacy was always sloshing back diet cokes, one after another, as if tooth rot was the answer, if there ever was one.

Wilson is waiting on the curb when they pull in, hands stuffed in his pockets, looking small and lost beneath the A-line, white delineation of Stacy's roof. House's blue eyes widen with betrayal, taking in everything without wanting, though he was intending to take no other thing from that man for as long as he lived. Cuddy grits her teeth, accustomed to swallowing guilt when it comes to these two. "Get out," she orders, and unlocks the door without taking her eyes off his face. "Get out Greg," because she's heard that repetition works with unruly dogs as well as stubborn toddlers.

House flings the door open and surges to his feet on the curb, faster than she's ever thought possible, turning to glare at her over the roof of her car. "You-"

"I'm sorry!" Since this obviously isn't Cuddy speaking… the fight flows out of House as inaudibly and eventually as a sigh.

"I- I'm sorry that I freaked out. It's just I've loved you for so- I never dreamt you'd want to to, to t-touch me too, I…" face flaming, Wilson slips unchallenged into House's personal airspace, brown eyes pinning his pallid companion against the Chevy, his gaze anxious and unwavering. "It's just, sometimes it's hard to get what you want," he trails off hesitantly, and Cuddy's heart seizes, but House's hands are on his shoulders, roughly pulling him close and suddenly, unbelievably they are kissing and Cuddy backs quietly into Stacy's shaded doorway, barely breathing.

"You think this is hard?" House gasps, hands tangled in Wilson's beastly tie, eyes glowing, face glowing, godlike in his exuberance. Cuddy closes her eyes, allows her images of the two men to dissolve peacefully into each other. Later, listening to Oprah preach loudly from Stacy's TV, Cuddy finds herself laughing uncontrollably, and it is a long, long, while, before any of them notices.

××××××

The first thing Cuddy smells when she enters House's office is, well, oddly familiar.

"House, what the _fuck _are you burning in here?"

"Nothing," he quips innocently, "I just got here. Smells like something in the vent, though. Why don't you crawl up on my desk and fix it, boss? I would, you know, but this bum leg…" The empty coffee maker aligns itself with his first statement, but House has never been one to pass up any opportunity that might involve ogling. Of course, he isn't anticipating that Cuddy will be such a pro at this; she has the vent open and emptied before he even has a chance to comment on the color of her underwear.

"Gimme." She acquiesces, but only because she spies his strategically placed beating stick, and she doesn't feel like getting spanked. House unfolds the paper, snorts, smiles, and swallows thickly. Cuddy averts her eyes from the hickey that has suddenly become visible from this new angle atop his desk. "L-love note?" she stammers, trying to keep the envy out her voice.

"None-ya." He smirks and crumples the paper, evilly, tossing it into the garbage can with practiced nonchalance. "Thanks, babe. Smells much better." He brightens, shooting her a grin. "Wilson's office smells like rat. Isn't that romantic?" Cuddy reins her fury by carefully cataloguing the crumpled outline of the discarded note. For reinforcement, she thinks, placatingly. For later. A waft of something unpleasant reaches her nose as she enters her office. Good thing she's got the skeleton key, she thinks, because today, she's really going to need it.

××××××

Greg,

Don't worry. You're all the woman I need.

Love, James

End.

Review please!


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